Topics - scourge

The Pew Research Center and the Social Media Research Foundation analyzed thousands of twitter conversations going back to 2010. They found these conversations occoured based on the structure of the individual’s Twitter network. For example, the subjects and content that a person tweets about, the people they follow, the people who follow them and the way they network creates a structure of social activity. In a recently released report Pew reports that they uncovered six distinct patterns for these structures.

“These are data-driven early steps in understanding Twitter discussion structures that contribute to the emerging science of social participation,” Ben Shneiderman professor of computer science at the University of Maryland and a report-co-author said. “This new field is emerging right before our eyes and could eventually have a large impact on our understanding of everything from health to community safety, from business innovation to citizen science and from civic engagement to sustainable energy programs.”

Here's what people assert when they want to distance themselves from taking responsibility for their own bad behavior. It's also known as displacement.

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Don't hate the player. Hate the game.

1. Sorry I cheated. Too bad you got hurt though. But don't hate us players. It's just what everyone does these days. 2. I didn't mean to wreck everyone's life with my addiction. But there are dealers everywhere in town and it is so easy to score. Don't hate me hate the escapist-addiction culture.

When state sanctioned open season is proposed, the foregoing would be some of the wild game in the crosshairs.

Disease models can be used to understand the mass adoption and subsequent flight from online social networks, researchers at Princeton’s Department of Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering say in a study released Jan. 17. The study has not been peer-reviewed. Updating traditional models on disease spread to assume that “recovery” requires contact with a nondiseased member — i.e., a nonuser of Facebook (“recovered” member of the population) — researchers predicted that Facebook would see a rapid decline, causing the site to lose 80% of its peak user base between 2015 and 2017.

Basically, Facebook users will lose interest in Facebook over time as their peers lose interest — if the model is correct. ”Ideas, like diseases, have been shown to spread infectiously between people before eventually dying out, and have been successfully described with epidemiological models,” write the researchers.

According to Israeli coder Tal Ater, any computer running the Chrome browser can eavesdrop on conversations happening around it.

While working on his on speech recognition software, Ater found the eavesdropping bug. "Even while not using your computer - conversations, meetings and phone calls next to your computer may be recorded and compromised," wrote Ater in a blog post after finding the bug. Ater says the bug emerges when malicious sites try to sabotage the way Chrome handles speech recognition.

China's factories lurched into 2014 at a reduced speed, with manufacturing activity falling to a six-month low.

HSBC said that its "flash" measure of sentiment among manufacturing purchasing managers fell to 49.6 in January from 50.5 in December.

January's reading raises a red flag, as any number under 50 indicates a deceleration in the manufacturing sector. If factory activity continues to lag in the coming months, it could be ominous for China's economy and pose an even greater challenge for the government's plans to enforce economic reforms.

Experts believe reforms are necessary to sustain the world's second-largest economy, especially as China seeks more stable expansion following decades of ballooning growth.

All empires grow too gigantic to bother with anymore. Big ambitions, which practically define them, eventually outstrip an empire's ability to implement or maintain them anymore but they go ahead anyway, stall and begin to gain nothing from them, then get terminally dispirited which is the ultimate killer of each.

TOPEKA, Kan. (WIBW) -- A sperm donor must pay child support as a father, the Shawnee Co. District Court ruled on Wednesday.

Judge Mary Mattivi said William Marotta and the lesbian couple with whom he helped conceive a child simply failed to conform to Kansas law. The law states a licensed physician must be involved in an artificial insemination process.

The women, Angela Bauer and Jennifer Schriener, claimed they did the procedure themselves at home. Marotta had signed documents waiving his parental rights.

The state sued Marotta for child support when Schreiner received financial assistance.

President Obama says marijuana use is no more dangerous than alcohol, though he regards it as a bad habit he hopes his children will avoid.

"As has been well documented, I smoked pot as a kid, and I view it as a bad habit and a vice, not very different from the cigarettes that I smoked as a young person up through a big chunk of my adult life,'' he said in a magazine interview. "I don't think it is more dangerous than alcohol."

"Conan Meets The Flower Children of Set" might have been a better name for the film - and if there is any resemblance between the cinema version of CONAN THE BARBARIAN and that of Robert E. Howard, it is purely coincidental. The disappointment which began to grow inside me about one-quarter of the way into the film was not mitigated by anything which happened later on. In fact, bad became worse. I refuse to become involved in even a brief synopsis of the movie's story line.

The armor was good; the weapons less so, but passable. The muscular Arnold Schwarzennegger made a fine Conan, except - as all Conan fans know - the Cimmerian has black hair, not brown. More important, Conan can take out any opponent, even a muscular dude with a huge wooden maul. He doesn't need to resort to cheap mechanical traps versus anything less than the incarnation of a god, demon, or worse.

If you like special effects, the film is passable. If you have any respect for Conan as presented by Howard, then I suggest that you stay away from the theater or else be prepared for great disappointment. Pointless, excessive violence and gratuitous helpings of sex certainly don't help allay this impression. Director Dino De Laurentiis has a way of screwing up basically good material, as he did with his remake of King Kong. He really did a number on CONAN THE BARBARIAN, and L. Sprague de Camp should have been ashamed to allow his name to appear in the list of credits as "Technical Advisor."

from Dragon #63, Vol. VII, No. 1

The second review, the Sword and the Sorcerer movie, has been omitted from the original article partly shown here.

Since most people can’t pronounce ideology, much less define it, a brief definition is in order: any prescriptive values system, in contrast to deductive value systems. A prescriptive value system tells you what you should do; a deductive one tries to figure out reality, and tell you what will happen if you do x, y or z, and thus points out what an optimal course of action is.

Our prescriptive system follows from out of rationalism which is rooted in an imaginary reality of what ought to be instead of the temporal one of what is or must be. Since what's rational can also be deduced, the conflict is therefore between empiricism and rationalism.

We have a real problem marrying the two. We refuse to believe consistent observations about our world because some exceptions have shown us otherwise. The exceptions themselves are subjected to a kind of broad brushed, idealistic artistic license like Thomas Jefferson's famous quote about all men created equal along with some of the experiences of parts of early America.

Our rationalism tells us that these various exceptions exemplify a basis for a prescriptive rule set and that by applying this rule set (equality, world democracy e.g.) we may overcome the conditions we have been observing.

When we fail to overcome, our sole solution is to reapply the rule set:

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If the action fails, there wasn’t enough of the ideology, or it was sabotaged by some ideological enemy. There is never any means for the ideology to stop and criticize itself.